The problem of over-optimization… Further thoughts on Wither the white middle class?   

Matt Damon and Sam Rockwell were robbed!… Let's talk about the most useless awards ceremony in the history of film!   

Women in the workplace, redux… A few more thoughts on some of the changes that have come about on the coattails of women's suffrage.   

Psychoanalysis and the Culture of Critique… I summarize and discuss Kevin MacDonald's presentation of psychoanalysis as a Jewish science in the latest installment of my overview of The Culture of Critique.   

Women in the workplace… What is the real reason for the eviction of women from their role as homemakers?   

Mel Gibson owns… Who else can make a fat local news personality quiver like a bowl of jelly just by staring him down?   

An examination of The Culture of Critique… A detailed overview and discussion of Kevin MacDonald's controversial book on Jewish influence over five important intellectual movements is up at MyPostingCareer.com.   

Mad Men season 3 post mortem… I give my final, post-second thoughts assessment of Mad Men season 3.   

The stupidity of crowds… Our brains handle the complexity of modern life by becoming stupid.   

Kindle 2 review… Is there anything I like about Amazon's e-book reader?   

Unchecked baggage… I review Up in the Air.   

This is not a review of Avatar… It's a brief look at James Cameron's class warfare.   

What's the matter with liberals?… We're not in Kansas anymore.   

Our future is Palin!… More comments on the strangest political fad since a man named Barry learned how to read.   

The trouble with atheists… I make a case for the dangers of atheist morality.   

Great or not so great?… I compile a partial list of worst great movies.   

Affirmative action and its discontents… Comments on the implications of Hasan's meltdown   

The Nerd Sex… Why beta males are homophiles.   

You fools… Getting awfully riled up about Steve Sailer's commenters in The Mad Men thread.   

That thing you Jew… Who's Afraid of Kevin MacDonald?   

Paranormal Activity… Movie review here.   

Why high IQ people lack common sense… The stupidity of intelligence.   

The new Party… In reaction to a Sailer piece, I have a new post on the new Party.  Last sentence:  "The new Party often squabbles loudly over policy differences, but as with Krauthammer it has few if any differences over principle. You might say its differences are all in the family."   

Mad Men discussion… The Mad Men thread on MyPostingCareer.com.   

Review of The Informant!… My review of The Informant! is here.   

My Posting Career… I've set up a forum that will ultimately replace this weblog.  In fact I have two blog-like posts up there now, which is more than my entire contribution to Udolpho.com in the past year:

White culture? That's racist!

Conservative crack-up

More to come!  Visit a forum that gets up to three posts a day!  It only takes 15 minutes to read every thread!  That's easily time you can spare your loved ones.   

I was banned from their Internet (very serious business)… The weirdest thing about blogs is how they completely settled in and gave birth to blogettes like Facebook and (God help us) Twitter, the last refuge for people who look in the mirror and see a distinguished posting career.  I don't know where you go from Twitter, maybe t-shirts that wirelessly display your current status on e-cloth.  The other weirdest thing is how completely normal it now is to be out of your mind crazy.

They don't come any crazier than the fellow who permanently banned me from his forums.  An expatriate ex-mormon who fled to Glorious Nippon to take a Japanese blide and escape personal debts, and who then fled to ching chong China to escape his Japanese blide, and who then went back to Japan to kidnap his gay son, and who then converted to Orthodox Christianity on the suggestion of an equally nutty Slav he met on the Internet, and who is now a neo-fascist Truther even more obsessed with Jews than Jews themselves are – well at some point your craziness becomes so expansive that it needs chapter breaks and a commentary track.  Oh by the way he hates his father.

There's nothing wrong with this picture if you ask him.  It's just, you know, how we do.  What I've found is that crazy people inevitably turn on me, and some time after I mentioned that he was out of his mind he took away all my posting privileges, then gave them all back, then took them all away again (I might have had something to do with that) and banned me permanently, so says the logon screen anyway.

It was fun while it lasted, and you've got to expect a little drama from someone matching the above description, and yes toward the end I did goad him on in his dementia, but it struck me that this was more than about some crazy e-Hitler kicking me out of his e-clubhouse.  (For starters it was about me.)  It was also the way the Internet has injected a steady stream of hormones into daily life, political discourse, and the serious business of serious business.  You can't watch cable news now without seeing tantrums, insane partisan speeches, and commentary that appears to come from Bizarro World.  Our politics is a shambles, our economy is run by lunatics, and our culture works like an installed art exhibit.  Instead of policy debate we have fat, blustery idiots crashing town hall meetings and screaming at the tops of their lungs until union bully boys shove them out.

It's a world of change from the sober, gray news media that once supported fat newsweeklies and earnest policy journals and talking heads set around a table for hour-long discussions about SALT II.  Now we have fat bloggers and smug e-zines and podcast recordings of hour-long discussions about pop culture trivia.  This zeitgeist of insanity, in which closeted news aggregators go to war against chief executives with father abandonment issues (there's that meme), has been fed by the impulsive, hormonal, childish world of the Internet.  I see a distinct reflection of it in the television show Mad Men, whose current season slogan is "the world's gone Mad"; the show depicts American life right before the great civil and social upheaval of the late 60s and early 70s.  (It reminds me of another great zeitgeist-defining program, The Sopranos, which Mad Men creator Matt Weiner wrote for.)  For the past twenty years we've been watching normalcy recede; Orthodox Christian neo-fascist Truthers are the new normal.

I'm still done with blogging.  I'm going to start my own forum for purposes of entertainment and intelligent discussion, a place where crazy will only get you cruelly mocked.  Maybe only five people will visit, and three of them will be dysfunctional nerds, but at least two of us will be reasonably amused.  Watch this space for details.   

Internet People… If there is a bottom to the Internet, it must be where all the Internet People go to talk about how being Internet People has made them the people they are today – irreverant, witty, popular, appealing, insightful OH GOD please just let me block out my horrible mundane existence for a few more seconds!

My first clue that Internet People were a mixed bag was while following the crackup of Steven Den Beste, a neo-pederast and headcase who went from championing the Iraq War to writing obsessively about warped Japanese cartoons twenty four hours a day.*  The desert wastes can break a man, but all the way in San Diego?  At a Starbucks?

After that I started to notice the Internet People more frequently.  They all had "blogs" in which terribly important things like why they hyphenated their last names and their struggles with drive-through attendants were discussed in insane detail.  They often wrote at length about their personal lives at a level of revealingness that would be awkward for a spouse or sibling to deal with, and when they weren't writing about their closeted emotions they were cramming onto the screen novellas of personal trivia – ask me which comic book character I most resemble and the nerd quiz I took which proves it.  Do you seriously not know anyone to whom you can tell all your boring secrets?

Most Internet People I came across were straightforward nerds like Den Beste – afraid of life's surprises, seeking comfort in an electronic hugbox where everyone talks and thinks alike – but the nerd is only the first among many Internet People:  cat ladies, partisan apparatchiks, forum bros, overweight tweeners, earnest academics whose best hope for a captive audience are search engine spiders – these and many others fill out the ranks of non-nerd Internet People.  If it weren't for the Internet you'd never know they existed.

I once thought I had found the quintessential Internet Person in the form (such as it is) of James Lileks, perhaps the most pompous and self-obsessed local newspaper columnist ever born.  There is something of the failed local columnist (Lileks was sacked from his job in 2007) in every Internet Person, someone having a myopic belief in his own importance far beyond what reality would support.

Before there was an Internet, there was the local column, a place where losers with some mysterious hold over a newspaper publisher could publish volumes of retarded and meaningless prattle.  The local column was basically a sinecure, as I only ever saw death remove one of these entities from its perch, at least until the newspaper began its decline at the mercy of the Internet's banal narcissism.  You just had to put up with them as they had yet another epiphany about a pumpkin patch or run-down historical site.

But as the signal quality of the Internet Person is his mediocrity, Lileks may be too successful (on his own failed terms) to qualify anymore.  Perhaps a better candidate for transcendant Internet Person is the anonymous Gawker Media "editor" (more at intern), the snarking thirtysomething who writes ephemeral catty put-downs for food and who is literally interchangeable with his co-workers (it keeps them in line and preserves the inimitable Gawker house style).**  Such beings embody both the frivolity and the transience of Everything Internet and eagerly trade dignity for a very small currency of status.  Do you even know anyone who knows anyone who once wrote for Gawker Media?  Perhaps no one does.

Yet I loathe to give the title to a non-nerd.  The Internet has been such an impressive facilitator of nerd defects – everything from Slashdot to libertarian blogs to Wikipedia stand as awesome monuments to the nerd's homely values – that it does not seem right to allow a non-nerd the dubious prestige.

The Internet is a weird place filled with weird people and I'm not entirely sure anymore that it really exists.  It seems that if you just unplugged every computer at once the whole embarrassing mess would simply disappear, so much the better.